Myth Happens

I realized last night that my life has been thin on new music lately. Partly this is a function of not being able to afford albums, so I spent several hours trawling music blogs and listening to bands I'd never heard of. It was fun. One of the immediate finds was Dum Dum Girls, who in time-honored postmodern fashion I discovered not through their own songs, but their rocking cover of the Smiths' "There Is a Light That Never Goes Out."

Background. There was a stretch in 2012 when derspatchel and I visited Blue Shirt Café regularly because they served very good smoothies and juices and their sandwiches were pretty decent, although I never ordered the chicken Caesar again after it melted apart on me in the balcony of Responsible Grace. We joked about their music; it tended toward the spacy, emo, and sad. And then one afternoon we were stuck in an interminable line with the blender needing repair—producing an earsplitting noise every time it was in use—and every single song we could hear in between the gear-grinding whines wasn't just sad, it was actively depressing, apathetically dying relationships followed by twenty-something disaffection followed by just plain gloom, and finally, finally when the blender cut out: And if a ten-ton truck kills the both of us . . . Rob refers to the place as Depresso Café to this day.

So I promptly sent him the cover, calling it a redemption of the song: the propulsive drumbeat was part of it, "but I think what mostly helps is Morrissey not singing it." And then I felt that I might have maligned Morrissey. I don't have anything against the Smiths per se; "This Charming Man" sticks in my head on a not infrequent basis and the last two lines of "Cemetry Gates" are almost as good a manifesto as the line I'm always quoting from the Dresden Dolls. So I gave the song another listen and tried not to think about apple juice. Divorced from the traumatic context of Blue Shirt, I can hear that Morrissey is actually doing very interesting things with his voice: he sounds cracking and vulnerable and yet strangely flip on the chorus, as if he's aware on some level that he's being hopelessly melodramatic, but that ten-ton truck is still as serious as it gets. It's a transfixingly adolescent song. It's entirely inside its own head. You can't tell whether the narrator's parents really have kicked him out of the house or whether things just feel that way; he can fantasize about dying in a road accident with whoever's got the car, but when it comes to a sexual move between them, he ducks away. He has that shapeless, desperate need to get away that hasn't gotten any further than anywhere, I don't care, but sometimes that's all you need to drive all night. You can't tell if he'll still feel the same in the morning. It doesn't really matter; you can't see morning from the end of this song.

But he is still actually flat on the chorus.

In other things I should really have been expecting, Derek Jarman directed the video. It's the middle segment of The Queen Is Dead (1986), a short film incorporating three Smiths songs in a structure similar to Marianne Faithfull's Broken English (1979). The style, the visual subject matter, and the timing make me want to see The Last of England (1987) more than ever.

Happy spring!